scrying | 2024 | photography
“Scrying (love)” is a series of photographs drawing on Beck’s childhood delight in gazing through glass marbles, which he recently came to consider a primal experience of the satisfaction of experiencing objects and scenes through a lens. Making use of his longstanding practice of (re-)photographing images through refractive surfaces and substances, Beck photographed images of his beloved childhood toys through those very same marbles, generating inverted and distorted portraits of these cherished effects. Paying homage to the work of his teacher Mike Kelley, Beck marries Kelley’s use of stuffed animals as symbols for cultural practices and psychological phenomena with his own photographic methods. Perennially stimulated by questions of artistic influence and legacy, Beck places these images in brightly colored, painted frames in a fashion clearly inspired by Sarah Charlesworth’s 1983-1988 series “Objects of Desire.” As the writer David O’Neill wrote of Charlesworth’s work, this body of photographs by Beck are “deceptive and honest, universal and personal, alienating and beckoning.”
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